Let's debunk the myths of Israel

The Israel-Palestine conflict is a very modern phenomenon. It didn't formally begin until 1948, or at the earliest, you might say in the early 1900s. That's still a very long conflict, but it's about 100 years at most, significantly less than the 3,000 years you hear people cite.

It is true that Israelis are mostly Jewish and Palestinians are mostly Muslim, but religion is pretty low on the list of direct drivers of the conflict. This is not, despite what your grade school teacher may have suggested, a clash between Judaism and Islam over religious differences. It's a clash between nationalities — Israeli and Palestinian — over secular issues of land and nationhood. This gets to a bigger misconception: that the conflict is between Jews and Muslims over religion. In fact, those two religious groups have been coexisting in the region, for the most part peacefully, since Islam was first born in the seventh century.

What matters is not whether the present Jews in Israel are the authentic descendants of those who lived in the Roman era, but rather the state of Israel’s insistence that it represents all the Jews in the world and that everything it does is for their sake and on their behalf. Until 1967, this claim was very helpful for the state of Israel. Jews around the world, in particular in the United States, became its main supporters whenever its policies were questioned. However, even there, as well as in other Jewish communities, this clear association is nowadays challenged. Zionism was originally a minority opinion among Jews

Palestine was not an empty land. It was part of a rich and fertile eastern Mediterranean world that in the nineteenth century underwent processes of modernization and nationalization. It was not a desert waiting to come into bloom. It was a pastoral country on the verge of entering the twentieth century as a modern society, with all the benefits and ills of such a transformation. Its colonization by the Zionist movement turned this process into a disaster for the majority of the native people living there.